Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Zealots who promote clean renewable energy always promise the
world. They tell us that clean renewable energy will be cheap and efficient. We
will all have the power we need and will be able to pay for it. Perhaps the
technogeeks Silicon Valley and Al Gore can pay for it, but increasingly, in
Queensland, Australia, the cost of electricity is soaring
and average people are being disconnected.

TODAY’S
confronting revelation that more than 464 Queenslanders a week are having their
electricity disconnected because of soaring power prices is a wake-up call to
the Labor Party. (snip)

Labor’s
zealotry on renewable energy targets is sending the country broke. (snip)…

With a
Queensland state election looming – the likely date being late October or early
November – cost-of-living pressures are emerging as a major poll issue. In
fact, power prices could emerge as the biggest single issue. (snip)

Latest
official figures from the Australian Energy Regulator show a 55 per cent leap
in the number of households that had their power cut off in the three months to
March. With more than 18,000 disconnections in the first nine months, the
2016-17 total is set to easily top last year’s 21,667. And in a further
indication of consumers’ struggle, the number of Queensland customers entering
formal payment plans with their providers has soared by a third to 42,361.
Payment plans allow consumers to pay agreed amounts in instalments – according
to their capacity and estimated usage over the coming year – to make it easier
to budget.

Welfare
specialists say people are doing it incredibly tough around cost-of-living
pressures. Mark Henley, CEO of Queensland Council of Social Service, says
energy is “the one that is really hurting people’’. Of course, it’s the regions
that once again are hit hardest. The air-conditioning costs in north Queensland
are onerous because of the heat.

Of course, the clean green energy crowd was lying. They want
you to return to the state of nature, without any electricity. As you swelter
in your mud hut you can comfort yourself with the thought that you are saving
the planet.

If that’s not sufficiently comforting, keep in mind that,
in the absence of air conditioning thousands of older people died in their homes in Paris a
few years ago during a heat wave.

Stuart: Zealots who promote clean renewable energy always promise the world. They tell us that clean renewable energy will be cheap and efficient. We will all have the power we need and will be able to pay for it.

Agreed, overpromising is a dangerous way to pave any revolution. Nuclear power almost could make that promise if we were careful, while there is nothing else that can replace any serious fraction of our energy demands now.

My view has always been that we need to lower our expectations if we want to believe in the future, while of course once you give people a free lunch (like 1000 "energy slaves" per person as fossil fuels provide) its hard to say what future we could or should hope for.

H.G. Wells is claimed to have said “When I see an adult on a bicycle I do not despair for the future of the human race” but that was 120 years ago when the alternative was hungry horses.http://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/hgwells/

$500 bicycles won't save civilization any more than $50k electric cars will, but at least when the grid goes down, you can still travel to see the empty grocery store shelves. And it'll always be debt that scares me more than merely not having much money. You can be proud to carry a sign "Will work for food", while "Will work to make minimum payments on my credit card balance" is too humiliating to contemplate.

The only thing I'm sure of is we'll never have a world where 7-9 billion people can trash and waste our material abundance as Americans do today. [Don't (be happy) worry] is good advice which ever way you choose read it.